A VITALLY IMPORTANT QUESTION

Pacific Press Publishing Company · OAKLAND, CAL., KANSAS CITY, NEW YORK · Nov 28, 1900

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 26, No. 48.

A VITALLY IMPORTANT QUESTION

ONE of the most important questions before the world to-day is the Sabbath question.

This statement may be ridiculed, but ridicule will not change the fact. Priest, preacher, publisher, and legislator may endeavor to keep the question in the background, but it continually thrusts itself upon the attention of all with ever-increasing persistency. It can not be set aside.

The Sabbath question is important, because among other things it involves in its comprehensiveness,— (1) The veracity, not to say infallibility, of Holy Writ; (2) The authority of God's Word as against tradition and apostasy; (3) The existence of Protestantism; (4) The future of civil government.

1. As Regards the Veracity of Holy Writ.—Do the Scriptures speak the truth in the account given in Genesis as to the origin of the septenary cycle and the Sabbath? The Sabbath stands there, and in the Ten Words of Exodus 20, as God's memorial of creation, to call to the constant remembrance of His creatures His almighty power, manifest in speaking into existence and form in six literal days the things of Gen. 1:3-31. "He spake, and it was; He commanded, and it stood fast." "By the word of the Lord were the heavens made." Is the Record true, or shall we believe the fanciful abstractions of evolution, which either denies the Word or explains away its creative power by its hopeless hypotheses? Did God make the earth in six days by the mighty power of His Word, or did it "evolve" through countless ages?

The Sabbath is the sign between God and His people, that they may not only know that He is God, but that He is Jehovah that sanctifies them. Eze. 20:12, 20. But the Sabbath is nothing to the evolutionist. To hold it as God gave it would be a denial of His hypotheses.

Again and again God encourages the weak and sinful soul to believe that He is able to cleanse, save, and regenerate now, and He offers as the proof of this His power in speaking the world from chaos to cosmos. See John 1:1-12; Isa. 42:5, 6; Col. 1:13-19; Isa. 45:17, 18, etc. Does He mean this? Jesus said: "If ye believed Moses, ye would believe Me; for he wrote of Me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe My words?" John 5:46, 47.

2. The Sabbath Question Involves the Authority of God's Word as against the Tradition of Apostasy.—For only apostasy pleads for tradition; the true will be satisfied with nothing less than the original source.

Now the only weekly Sabbath, or Lord's day, which the Bible knows is the seventh-day Sabbath. All Sabbath laws, precepts, promises, and blessings center in that. That Sabbath was constituted, by God's rest, blessing, and sanctification, by which He placed His own presence in the seventh day, a constant pledge of everlasting rest through the power and love of Jesus Christ. Gen. 2:2, 3. Its law is one of the immutable Ten Words spoken by God's voice, written by His own finger on tables of stone: Ex. 20:8-11; Deut. 5:22. It was observed by our divine Exemplar, Jesus Christ, by whose "obedience" to the holy law we are made righteous (Rom. 5:19), and by faith in whom the law is established in the heart (Rom. 3:31). "The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God."

Opposed to this is a day which, in the position it occupies in the septenary cycle, could not be a Sabbath, could not be a memorial of creation. It has no authority in the Word of God. It is only by unwarranted inferences, hallowed by tradition, that it is made to seem to have any Biblical authority at all; and it is safe to say that if the professed people of God were not now keeping it, they would utterly reject as unworthy of a sabbath basis the insufficient and often contradictory evidence put forth in Sunday's behalf.

Upon the one side or the other of this question the world must choose. One is of God; the other is against Him, whatever it may have seemed or does seem to be to honest the uninstructed thousands. A counterfeit bill never becomes genuine by passing as current money, tho it may have been used as such by thousands of honest people. Error never becomes truth, however many honest people may have believed it. The Sunday-sabbath, or Lord's day, according to the Bible, God's great Detector, is a counterfeit, a hoary error; and Jesus tells us, "Every plant which My heavenly Father planted not, shall be rooted up." Matt. 15:13. Which shall it be, the eternal Word of truth, or lying and perishing tradition?

3. The Sabbath Question Involves the Existence of Protestantism.—For Protestantism is founded on the Bible, and the Bible only; but when Protestantism knowingly comes face to face with truth and rejects that truth for tradition, or holds to received tradition in the light of opposing truth, she, by so doing, as Dowling well says, steps down from the Protestant rock, passes the line which divides Protestantism from popery, and can give no valid reason why every doctrine of the Papacy should not be received on the same basis. In this Sabbath question now before the world Protestantism is facing the very question of its existence, and by it she stands or falls.

4. The Sabbath Question Involves the Future of Civil Government.—Why?—Because the friends of Sunday all over the world are under various pleas pressing upon the governments of earth, contrary to the teachings of Christ, the duty of the State to enforce the observance of Sunday by law. But Christ's "kingdom is not of this world." Control of conscience and of faith and religion belongs to God alone. Every government that has set itself against truth and liberty in the past has fallen. As long as civil government, however imperfect it has been, has progressed toward liberty, God has suffered it to continue. But when, in the face of light, government sets itself against God, or assumes to act in God's stead, its fall is certain.

By the pressure now being brought to bear upon civil governments, legislators, rulers, local, national, and international, decision must soon be made. Popular governments will go with the prevailing human influence, and this will probably be to enact sabbath laws. But to yield to such demand is death to any government; it is departing from the law of its life.

This in brief shows the importance of the Sabbath question. O soul, on which side will you stand? Will it be with error, tradition, civil law, and death? or will it be with God and righteousness and truth and life?